Still, if you have just started blogging, then there’s nothing wrong with starting out with free WordPress hosting. However, please note that free web hosts may block/ban your account when you start getting good traffic.

Best Free WordPress Hosting Providers

000webhost.com is the best free WordPress hosting solution with incredible features available for FREE. They say that their service is better than paid hosting.

Take a look at the features of 000webhost.com:

1500 MB Space

100 GB Monthly Bandwidth

5 Addon Domains

5 Sub Domains

5 Email Accounts

PHP

MySQL

1 FTP Account

99% Uptime Guarantee

Script installer

Custom Error Page

JULY 2014 UPDATE:

We have decided that we can no longer in good faith recommend 000webhost as a suitable free web hosting provider.

Frankly, too many complaints have come in from our readers. We have been told repeatedly that several Bloggers’ sites have been closed down without reason or warning-and with no chance of getting the data back.

Some of these users were told that their accounts were terminated simply because the user uploaded forum software to their hosting account.

In fact, a major complaint is that these account holders have received zero response from the owners of 000webhost.

So now they can’t even access backup copies of their files, if they were even backed up in the first place. We have also been informed that 000webhost has a referral program that is a total scam!

000webhost proclaim that they’ll give you $5 for every referral you send them if they maintains an active free hosting account for them for at least 30 days.

However, it’s all over the web that after 30 days, there’s a note entered into your account that they now need to verify new accounts for at least 60 days due to fraud, etc.

After 60 days, there’s never any commission sent to the 000webhost customer.

We simply cannot condone illegal activities, false promises and the disruption of our readers’ websites that are the basis for their hobbies or livelihoods.

If you currently maintain an account with 000webhost, we seriously advise that you terminate your account-but not until you switch everything to your new host!

More good news is that they don’t separate out and divide the free plans from the paid ones-all of the accounts use the same servers.

Therefore, the fact that they use Cloudlinux technology for all of their accounts is an incredible bonus for any free plan user because this technology is very similar to having a VPS server.

Because of this technology, the actions of any few accounts won’t ever affect the servers on the whole-and this means that the free plan gets a lot of the same benefits as the paid ones.

In addition, all accounts are on their Litespeed servers for even GREATER performance. I highly doubt any other free host would have such high speed, top quality VPS-like servers for their users.

After all, they get all the benefits associated with these performance-enhancing servers for free.

And they don’t and won’t force any ads or anything like that on free account holders. All that they require is a backlink in the footer of the users’ site to their website.

This is set by the user. All they have to show is a little wording along the lines of “Hosted by HostAwesome”, or “Powered by HostAwesome”-a small price to pay for free access to top-notch, high speed servers.

HostAwesome’s free WordPress hosting is a pure WordPress setup. What I mean by that is that account holders don’t have access to a cPanel, and can only control their site using WordPress.

BUT, if you need any small changes done, say to modify a file or something of that sort, you can contact them and they will do it for you.

In terms of their support, they actually communicate with you and I think that’s one of the biggest things that differentiates them from the rest of the free WordPress hosting providers out there.

They’re an honest host, and their support team is very responsive to your needs.

And again, if there is an offending account, they have Cloudlinux in place so that it doesn’t affect everyone else, although they always try to resolve an issue before it escalates to that.

Obviously, the level of support can’t be the same for paid users and free users, out of fairness. But this generally only applies to dedicated WordPress support.

If paid users have trouble with a theme issue, or if they need advice on how to change CSS, etc., they help with all of that.

In terms of hosting issues-if there are any issues with hosting for any accounts, they do their best to assist. And that’s not to say that they don’t help free users with WordPress issues.

They do, but if it’s something that’s going to take them 20 minutes to troubleshoot, that may be a bit out of reach.

I think generally, though, that an understanding is met when people sign up for the free plan. But I would say that they provide better support for their free users than the vast majority of free WordPress hosting companies.

Freehostia has least features but still it is free. You can use this for a test site etc. Because it offers only 250 MB space and 6 GB Storage.

Here are full features of Freehostia:

250 MB Space

6 GB Monthly Bandwidth

PHP

MySQL

Perl Free Script Installer

5 Domains Hosted

15 Sub Domains

50 Parked Domains

Custom MX and A Records

NS Records

3 Email Accounts

Email Auto-responder

Custom Error Page

1 FTP Account

Conclusion

I hope this article has given you some insight into your options for selecting a free host to showcase your talent.

Please remember that free doesn’t always equate to good, but there are still some good free WordPress hosting providers out there.

Nevertheless, you really have to be serious about your choice of web hosting provider if you plan to monetize your site or use it for your business.

If you’re really strapped for cash and you’re worried that a free host won’t suffice for your new online venture, then my best advice to you would be to start off with the free WordPress hosting plan over at HostAwesome.

If things take off and your business starts to thrive, you can always upgrade to one of their very affordable paid plans later.

And I mean affordable in the sense that you’re now making money and the monthly hosting fees are a pittance compared to the profits you’re now raking in.

The two things to remember about HostAwesome are their top quality servers and the fact that they will actually provide you support on their free plan.

Of course, you can always try the other free hosts referred to in this list, but again, they are recommended primarily for personal websites.

Lastly, if you’re not comfortable using a new host, such as HostAwesome, you can always go with GoDaddy.

They have been around for a very long time and are here to stay. Oh, and they do have that enticing $1 per month special on all new and existing accounts. It’s really hard to go wrong there. 🙂

Over to You

I hope you liked this article about free WordPress hosting providers. Please share it so more people like you can reach this useful information.

Have you had any bad experiences with any of the above-mentioned free WordPress hosts?

Have you perhaps been using any of them for the last few years and it’s been all smooth sailing?

Please let me know in the comments section below and the best of luck showing off your talents and passion to the world! 🙂

Byethost have now become a greedy breed of free hosting … from front they show no adds but every third or fourth day the in coming links to your site will be directed to another advertisment website so say a big no to it !!

Just desire to say your article is as astounding. The clarity to your put up is simply cool and i could suppose you’re a professional on this subject. Well together with your permission allow me to snatch your feed to stay updated with drawing close post. Thank you one million and please carry on the gratifying work.

Thank you for writing such an easy to understand article… without interjecting negative opinion to free hosting sites. I have read a few articles like this and basically they switch gears in the article and start saying how bad free sites are, like some of the responses here. The thing is not everyone can afford to start paying right off the top to get their feet wet in blogging, that is my case. I would think after looking at all the free sites you can also find one with decent upgrade possibilities so should your blog grow by leaps and bounds you can just go the money route. I don’t see getting negative about FREE… what do you expect for FREE? Anyway, thanks again Jafar. 🙂

just discovered inkfeeds.com and they seem to be extremely good… really fast no ads. i was with 000webhost but don’t like the fact they are so slow, inkfeeds provides fast servers because i think they want you to upgrade after
anyway free hosts are dangerous, but you never know

I have been around the block a few times with both free and paid wordpress hosting. I can assure you that paying is no guarantee of reliable or hassle-free service. Let me review your list above:
1. I agree with your downgrading of 000webhost.com – they are on the odd side to say the least. I have experienced more than one signup over the years, where the outcome was “we’ll send you your activation”. It never activated.
2. FreeHostia – I signed up last week, I paid for a domain name (transferred on). It was a 48-hour extravaganza re-uploading my 43-MB archived WordPress blog. Their PhpMyAdmin had issues trying to pull up the database, I had to re-do it 3 times, after pausing to “drop” tables in the SQL… and I don’t know anything about SQL, I had to go on tips from the staff backstage at Freehostia, who 8 times out of 10 told me the right thing to do. When the database was finally up, I had to FTP my files over. There was no other way to do it, no built-in upload. It took a long time, 3 hours on public library wifi using Ipswitch FTP client (excellent, by the way). Once the site was up, it worked immediately and looked fantastic, all the files were there, the posts, the pages, the comments, it looked just like it did, live, before I took the site down. A couple of hours later, it was GONE! “Error connecting to database”. But the database had been fine. The owners of Freehostia admitted that the server with my site on it, had problems, and was offline for “10 minutes”, they said. People to whom I had given my url the night before said it had been down ALL NIGHT. Meanwhile, I had tried to “fix” the database issue, because there had been NO NOTICE from Freehostia about the alleged server problems. I never got it “fixed”, it never came online again. Maybe you will have better luck, as the site did look good at the outset; but it didn’t last 5 hours! I have to say the Freehostia staff are quite polite, and quick to answer. As I say, maybe you’ll have better luck.
3. BYETHOST – Let me tell you, FORGET IT! It is not really “free” hosting at all, and they are cyberstalkers! I signed up a few months ago and uploaded an existing WordPress blog. I have to say their servers are excellent, they are the best I’ve seen. The blog went up quickly and beautifully, and looked great. I used a couple of megs of resources in doing it. Other than upload it, I did no other work, no domain was attached, no big traffic. IMMEDIATELY, I began to receive harassing emails from BYETHOST accusing me in no uncertain terms of abusing their servers (I had uploaded the text of a fairy tale I’m writing, with some pictures. No malware, no downloads, nothing “evil”) and here I was being really nastily accused of overtaxing their servers. I logged into cpanel to see how much space and bandwidth I had really used. I printscreened the cpanel to keep a record. IT WAS NEGLIGIBLE. The accusations were false. I logged out and found MORE accusations in my email, threatening to SHUT my site off unless I PAID FOR IT! OK, it was obvious, this isn’t “free” at all. They pretend it’s free to get you uploaded, and then they immediately, aggressively, and on false accusations, demand money. After a couple more accusing emails, I responded with printscreens proving that they were indeed false accusations of over-usage. They then had no choice but to “admit” I was right and they were wrong. Nonetheless, I cancelled the account and got out of there, I don’t like that kind of treatment.
Now, BYETHOST is a part of ifastnet – which I discovered by chance because I went looking for another host and found one that seemed to be based in USA. It was called Z80 US. I didn’t know it was also a Byethost/iFastnet company, but I soon found out.
I uploaded a quite different WordPress blog, clean, legal, no issues. In 24 hours, I got the archive files up and the database, it worked immediately, like a charm. Nice servers. And then it was CUT OFFLINE without notice, suspended, and some kind of ad for iFastnet attached to my Z80 url. In my email was a threat that I was abusing their resources. Here we go again. So, I contacted them, and pointed out I was not abusing anything, I had only just uploaded my blog. They put the blog back online. THEN they CUT IT OFF AGAIN! This time, they alleged my EMAIL ADDRESS was “disposable” and they disallow disposable email addresses for their members! But that was not an issue when I signed up, so it was just another PRETEXT to cut me off. This is standard Byethost/iFastnet tactics: bullying, harassing, false accusations, pretexts. I talked to them again; they restored the web site. This time, I went in and installed a couple of PLUGINS to detect intruders… and what do you know, I was being FOLLOWED into my blog by someone in the back-end of Z80! They were literally WATCHING me as I was going about my business fixing up my blog and organizing my posts. I realized they were going to “HIT” me again; so I quickly installed a WordPress backup plugin and grabbed an archive of my site, because I had made improvements to it, to fit a new them and layout. JUST AS I FINISHED downloading my archive, my sql and my xml, the little cyberstalker who had followed me in PULLED THE PLUG! I got another nasty email demanding money! TOO LATE, I had rescued my web site and I was happy to get out of there.

But wait, why was I signing up for these free hosts in the first place? Simple: I was in PAID hosting at $9.99 a month USD with VISIBA.COM – I’d been there 18 months in good standing with 14 blogs, most very small and just ideas I was playing with; 3 or 4 “main” blogs. VISIBA had the same techniques as iFastNet — they would FOLLOW me into my cpanel, offering to “chat”. At first I thought this is because I’m a new customer and they’re being helpful. It soon became apparent they do this all the time, and they are STALKING their customers. In addition, they began tampering with my PAID blogs! I began to document the tampering by taking backups. Suddenly, my backup plugins stopped working! I had to put different ones in until I exhausted every available free backup plugin, as they were “rendered non-functional” by somebody in the back-end, after each successful first backup of my web sites. From the back-end, through the whole PAID 18 months, there was constant, incessant tampering. Widgets were stripped out of the sidebars of one blog; a hyphen was coyly inserted in front of my paypal email address in a fundraising widget to prevent me raising funds. Images that were find began turning white and disappearing. CODE began to be changed, i.e., altering the dimensions of a promotional banner; randomly turning sections of text GREEN in a red & black blog (they had tampered with the SQL or the XML). I documented it all. I use my own themes made by me in Artisteer, often with color presets, so I knew there was no green in my red & black blog on communism. I also therefore never use any of the WordPress free themes. End of March 2014, I suddenly get a harassing email from these people (after 18 months of me keeping one step ahead of these leeches who were taking my money while attacking my web sites), alleging they were shutting down ALL 14 blogs (in my one account) for alleged “ABUSE” of their servers due to “malware”. They alleged my blogs were not “updated”, they required me to “update” WordPress to the current version, and to update all plugins and WordPress default themes! AND THEY LOCKED ME OUT, to prevent me from doing so, had I wanted to do so. However, the fix was in, because the blog they accused of being out of date had just been updated by me the week ago! All plugins were updated; I use my own theme; I didn’t want to update WordPress because I preferred the existing version. So, where was the nasty alleged “malware” and “viruses” they accused me of? They sent me email containing alleged links from my WP blogs directly to WordPress, claiming the default WordPress theme was “infected”… a theme I don’t even use. I consulted another host who said that only WordPress has to be concerned about so-called viruses in their own themes, supplied by them, it should not be an issue at my host. In any event, VISIBA locked out out to PREVENT me repairing the alleged damage; i.e., to PREVENT me proving and printscreen-ing that there was nothing wrong in my blogs! VISIBA locked me out and kept me out past the “deadline” in their ultimatum, to prevent me obviously proving they were lying, and more importantly, backing my sites up. Fortunately, from the 18 months of harassment in their back-end, I already had full back-ups of all my sites, files, xml, sql, I had learned the hard way. Finally, VISIBA took all my sites offline! Never to be seen again! Nice treatment for a client of 18 months who paid on time,. But after 18 months of accumulated damage to my blogs from their back-end, which is cyberstalking and harassment, it no doubt occurred to them it was time to really turf me out, they were now bored with their victim.
Turns out, VISIBA is a RESELLER of iFASTNET which is the vicious BYETHOST and Z80 US. Same tactics of “following” quietly in your tracks while you are working. And that wasn’t the first “issue” with VISIBA. In fact, within 2-3 months, VISIBA threatened to shut me off unless I PAID MORE for a server upgrade. I had used about 4GB of space in what seemed to be 25GB available for the $9.99 a month. VISIBA struck, declaring that I must now pay $35 a month for a VPS, a virtual private server, as my sites were devouring space and bandwidth, which they said was “unfair” to their other clients in the shared hosting. A bit of investigation on my part showed up the problem. VISIBA had migrated my sites for free (out of powrhost.com – which now no longer exists, it had been run by a 16-year-old kid). They did a TERRIBLE job of migration, leaving all my media files in my blogs ATTACHED to the old servers! This became apparent when Powrhost went offline and the images and media files in my new blogs vanished! Fortunately, the files had been transferred, so it required running the SQL at the Visiba end to “fix” the broken image urls. However, this was shoddy work to say the least; a slap-dash quick job to get you moved over and PAYING them, and then, good luck to you.

I also have reason to believe that some web teams who run hosting are actually running a bunch of different hosting companies, paid and free, all the same time, under different names. I suspect, but I can’t yet prove, that VISIBA back end also supervises freehostingnoads, because after Visiba turfed my PAID account, I moved one site to that new place, only to have my site quietly shut down without a word four days later… it seems to me that somebody at Visiba, whose name I won’t mention, is linked to freehostingnoads… and had followed me in there to turf me out, as well.

In conclusion, I seriously recommend that you AVOID iFASTNET and their fake “free” hosting, and their re-seller VISIBA. Personally, I wouldn’t touch any iFastNet reseller with a 10-foot pole; and I check the listings online now to see WHO really owns which hosts, no matter whether they are paid or free.

Good luck to everyone! Shop wisely for your host, always use backup plugins for your web sites; export your CURRENT XML after every time you do any work at all in your blog, however minor. And make sure your backup plugin copies the SQL and the files on a regular basis. Never trust a web host, free or paid. Be prepared for the worst, and you will have less to regret.

T: Sorry to hear about your total nightmares with Byethost and Visiba. Thanks for letting me and the rest of my readers know about this. I suggest that you go over to HostAwesome. I just switched to their paid WP Standard plan and I LOVE them! Transferring everything was a piece of cake-I did absolutely nothing and it was done in no time at all with no downtime or problems. My site has sped up considerably too (I’ll be doing a blog post about that soon). Dave, the founder, is an honest, stand-up fellow and he will treat you right. Tell him that Mike from Right Blog Tips sent you, because I am going to forward this on to him.

P.S. I didn’t quite finish the Visiba scam. My blogs which they had migrated had backup plugins, and each blog in its cpanel folder had a few backups. When Visiba migrated these blogs, they somehow arranged the transferred files so that my backup plugins were NOW backing up the 14 backups in each blog, over and over and over… which was starting to take space on the shared server. Obviously, they KNEW what the cause of the space problem was because they’d have looked into it. They didn’t expect ME to look into it. I did. I logged in and print-screened everything, and FOUND the “hidden” backups that were getting re-backed up, and I deleted them! And there went Visiba’s pretext to force me up to $35 a month on a VPS for “abuse of their resources and bandwidth” — precisely caused by their manner of “migration”, invisible to me in the WordPress dashboard, and only apparent after a detailed hunt through the cpanel for the hidden files buried in my migrated blogs. I think this was one reason for the incessant harassment after that, for the next 18 months. They didn’t catch their “fish” with their upgrade scam, and I became a paying victim until they decided to pull the plug.

Thanks for your feedback, Charity. Yes, it seems like it’s just not worth it anymore dealing with free hosts. And as for 000Webhost, I’ve heard all about their dodgy practices. That’s why I updated this article last year.

Hi! We started also with a free WordPress site at http://uni.verse.hosting, but eventually moved to their paid service since the difference is always worth it. So far we have had no issues and everything runs great, fast and responsive. Lots of extras too, like plugins, themes, CDN, webmail, ecommerce, etc.

We used to host the website ourselves but eventually decided that it was better to outsource it.